Have you actually listened it? It's not rip off nor lower quality item.

Sony designers admitted the idea itself is in the market more than 20 years. They R&D the idea long time but couldn't make product because they had to make balance between comfortability and sound quality.

As you mentioned, AKG K1000 produces superb sound, but it's heavy and not comfortable to wear. The problem is, to produce good base, speakers need to be big, just like K1000. Of course, die hard audiophiles don't care, but SONY is targeting much wider users and it was not acceptable size and weight.

Things changed recently. They realized new materials and duct design can reduce the speaker size, and carefully located speaker can control reflective sound more precisely.

(you can read designers interview here
http://www.sony.jp/topics/headphone/pfr-v1/index.html
it's Japanese article though)

I have one and I can say it's crystal clear sound and surprisingly comfortable. Some says base is weak. That might be true since most geeks here love canal type inner headphone like Etymotic or Shure, or full cover headset.

But we have to understand they're totally different systems and unfortunately, we can't get everything. Canal headphone tends to exaggerate base and sacrifice accuracy, full cover headphone produce most accurate sounds but generally it's heavy, open ear headphone can't produce as much base as others but can render accurate, speaker like sounds and can be very comfortable.

it's all matter of balance but I think Sony did good job here.

I'll be totally happy if they add Visual Studio Add-on for iPhone.
most unlikely though...

I've done that countless times, but it never fixed safari sudden death problem.

I'll wait until they release SP2.

If direct hardware access or OS-X call is not allowed, please just implement Java + some iPhone class libraries, Apple.

I rather drop the phone plan, but not EDGE.

I deleted my keyboard dictionary and switched French mode (both keyboard and language). Auto-complete didn't trigger Aujord'hui at any point. Then, I entered some sentences from French wikipedia iPhone page, it did suggest many words before completing it, or correct misspell. It seems suggestions were less frequent than English mode, but I think it's safe to say it's supporting French auto-correction.

Yes, Sir. 4 new international keyboards are supported from 1.1.2

English (UK)
French
German
Italian

I'm not familiar with French, so not sure if French auto correction is supported or not though.

I don't know about your iPhone, but my safari constantly crashes while I'm listening iPod, and iPod often skips songs or albums from the day 1. Even 1.1.1 didn't fix it.

Hope 1.1.2 really fixes the problem.

About the international keyboard support.

1.1.1 could activate Japanese keyboard if form language is specified as 'ja'. So, we could use a little hack registering following book mark to activate specific international keyboard;

javascript:document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].setAttribute('lang','ja')

It seems this hack does not work anymore. I was expecting the same language support as iPod touch, but 1.1.2 only supports additional 4 keyboards, and disabled this hack. it's a big disappointment.